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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
It quietly disproves the sentence people say most often about this, that they can never put it down. They already do, most days, for hours at a time. So the question stops being whether it is possible and becomes what those hours have in common: hands busy, other people present, somewhere that taking it out would be noticed. Then you build the next stretch to look a little more like that.
Men who are not distracted, either by commerce or profit, from remembering God (Quran 24:37). Attention that survives a working day is described as an ordinary human possibility, and you have been managing it since Monday.
النور
رِجَالࣱ لَّا تُلۡهِيهِمۡ تِجَٰرَةࣱ وَلَا بَيۡعٌ عَن ذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِ وَإِقَامِ ٱلصَّلَوٰةِ وَإِيتَآءِ ٱلزَّكَوٰةِ يَخَافُونَ يَوۡمࣰ ا تَتَقَلَّبُ فِيهِ ٱلۡقُلُوبُ وَٱلۡأَبۡصَٰرُ
men who are not distracted, either by commerce or profit, from remembering God, keeping up the prayer, and paying the prescribed alms, fearing a day when hearts and eyes will turn over
Qur’an 24:37read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A mixed methods study developed and evaluated a digital intervention for problematic smartphone use in students, and noted that this is a field with very few evaluated interventions. That thinness is the part worth carrying here: with so little tested, your own record of when you do and do not reach for it is a reasonable thing to lean on. It is not evidence that looking for exceptions works, because that has not been tested.
Kent S, Masterson C, Ali R, Parsons CE, Bewick BM. (2021). Digital Intervention for Problematic Smartphone Use.. International journal of environmental research and public health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Evidence from your own week is much harder to argue with than anything somebody else tells you.
Some people are in this far enough that an hour a week will not reach them, and the places that could help are expensive or full. Saying so out loud is part of the work, not a failure of it.
One client took two years of steady work to get a single app off her phone. If you are three weeks in and it is still there, you are not doing this wrong.
A rule that holds in your house and nowhere else is not really a rule. Children locate the unrestricted house within about a week.